While I’m not a fan of Calvinism (or the Block Universe view), both of which allow for “not yet” events to be predetermined (one by God, the other by mathematics), still, with that in mind, I’d enjoy watching this movie.

==

Ah! Here’s Calvinism’s Predestination:
“Predestination is a doctrine in Calvinism dealing with the question of the control that God exercises over the world. In the words of the Westminster Confession of Faith, God “freely and unchangeably ordained whatsoever comes to pass.””

Replace God with Mathematics or physical principles etc and you have the Block Universe view.

===

Well, what makes it a Calvinist view is the idea that “God knows the date we die” to such a specific degree that there would be some database out there that has all the dates on it that could be texted to the world.

it’s the old “fate vs free will” thing. Do the Greek Fates or God or randomness or scientific principles predetermine everything that happens all of the time, including our every thought?

Or are there degrees of freedom? Do we have some freedom of choice? Free will?

*whew* – good. I have friends who are big fans of some of the modern philosophers who argue that we have no free will because science / computers / etc will soon know our every thought before we think it. But I think they OVERESTIMATE what we _really_ know and can do.

We’d be long dead before technology can ever get to that point. So until somebody can tell me accurately what I’m going to be thinking next Tuesday at 9:03, I have free will

—

I was very late to learning philosophy. I avoided most of it ’til I was about 40. Then I joined a few Philosophy groups here on Facebook and decided “I’m going to learn by diving in”. I encountered a lot of jerks and a few very smart jerks and a few nice people.

Learned a lot. I had to research on the fly to know what people were talking about at first, but after a while, I figured out he major players and what they stood for and what was wrong with them, at least on a general level. I got to a point where I could debate rather well, using my own style of rhetoric and anticipating what they’d say next and countering it before they said it.

Then one day, after about a year, I got bored with it. But it was fun.

===

I find that fascinating as well. My tentative conclusion that works for me is “Embodied Cognition” – or one of the ideas in that family of ideas. It’s not perfect but it fits best with how I think. Took me a while to find it: I didn’t even know it existed. But when I did, I was like, “Ah!! that’s the one!”